Ending Science's Retreat.

• Author: Leef, George

Science in an Age of Unreason

By John Staddon

286 pp.; Regnery Gateway, 2022

Science depends on a liberal environment where the freedom to experiment, research, and debate the meaning of results is protected. This requires that government, church, and educational institutions refrain from interfering in the process of science. That has largely been the case for the last several centuries, but

Duke University psychology and neurobiology professor John Staddon worries in his new book Science in an Age of Unreason that the United States is retreating from the liberalism that catalyzed so much scientific progress. Powerful forces that dislike the neutrality and objectivity of science threaten to take us back to earlier times when it was more important to enshrine certain beliefs than to allow free-wheeling research and discussion.

If you doubt this retreat is occurring, think about the way officials in the United States (and many other countries) reacted to COVID. Doctors and medical researchers were told not to dissent from government pronouncements about vaccines, masks, and treatments. For example, rather than engaging with skeptics such as the epidemiologists who wrote the "Great Barrington Declaration," National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci and others sought to discredit them immediately. That is not the way of science, but the way of autocracy. Galileo would have understood just how the Great Barrington authors felt after the federal government dismissed their work and denigrated them.

Staddon argues that science is in dire straits in America because of the way it has become politicized. Many topics are now "off limits" because their exploration might offend politically important groups. Science should be dispassionate, but in the modern university passion often carries the day.

He writes:

Weak science lets slip the dogs of unreason: many social scientists have difficulty separating facts from faith, reality from the way they would like things to be. Critical research topics have become taboo, which, in turn, means that policy makers are making decisions based more on ideologically driven political pressure than on scientific fact. Politics or perish / How has science so badly lost its way? Both government and university efforts at "helping" science have managed to distort incentives and inject non-scientific concerns.

As Staddon explains, in older times scientists were not under pressure to get...